When President Obama was campaigning for his health-care reform plan, he assured us that the individual mandate was not a tax (“ObamaCare Overreach,” Besty McCaughey, PostOpinion, Dec. 14).

Expecting that a federal judge might find that the Commerce Clause in the Constitution cannot be used to support the mandate, as just happened, Obama smoothly reversed course and called it a tax.

It is duplicity like this that diminishes the status of politicians.

Paul Bloustein

Cincinnati

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Here’s an easy solution to the individual mandate provision in the health-care legislation so detested by Betsy McCaughey and other conservatives.

Start a charity from your salaries shilling for health-insurance companies to pay the bills for people who require medical care but chose not to get insurance.

Clifford D. Glass

Rego Park

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McCaughey cites a list of constitutional reasons and decisions for halting the use of mandates to fund the new health-care bill.

I agree with her reasoning, but I hope she is aware of the possible unintended consequences that might come about by killing the mandate.

One such consequence could be returning to the fight for a single-payer option. Given a second chance, a lot of people might have changed their minds about a single-payer system as they have seen their premiums go up by leaps and bounds.

Watch out for what you wish for as you just might get it — that is, the same, increasingly expensive system that’s going to cave in soon anyway.